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Comment by simbolit | Hacker News Reader

I think the authors confuses stories and /grand stories/ (sometimes called "meta-narratives").

I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. That literally is what history is, telling stories about the past. Yes, the stories should have a factual basis, and some don't, but that's not a problem with stories as such.

The problem lies with the desire for all stories to fit a /grand story/. Such a grand story is comforting, perhaps even pleasurable, when it gives a feeling of omniscience, of everything falling in place. But it is seldom helpful as a tool for prediction and problem-solving.

But what is helpful is small stories. The world is messy and contradictory, everywhere and all the time. Without simplified stories we can't make proper sense of it (it is far too complex for individual humans to 'understand').

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I have mixed feelings on this. While trivially it's true that we need to compress the world with stories, I do think there is a problem with people constructing grand narratives. We should be moving away from "story" and towards "hypothesis" so that we don't commit too strongly to a story that isn't supported by evidence.

IMO academic Historians love when their hypotheses are challenged, it shows a path for further understanding history, and writing an article with a richer narrative.

That’s what I saw during my History degree from my professors and the books i read.

> I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories.

History is story-telling. https://www.etymonline.com/word/story:

"connected account or narration, oral or written," c. 1200, originally "narrative of important events or celebrated persons of the past, true or presumed to be; history," from Anglo-French storie, estorie, Old French estoire "story, chronicle, history," and directly from Late Latin storia, shortened from Latin historia "history, account, tale, story.

The non-historical sense of "account of some happening or events alleged to have happened" is by late 14c., but the word was not differentiated from history until 1500s and was used at first also in most of the senses of history. In Middle English a storier was a historian (early 14c. as a surname), storial (adj.) was "historically true, dealing with history," and a book of story was a history book."

IMO, the title is bad. The complaint in the article isn’t about story-telling, isn’t even about making them (overly) dramatic, isn’t even on not mentioning facts (nobody disputes there were slaves working in those ironworks, or that a man named Cort was nearby at some time), but on adding ‘facts’ and building a story that doesn’t follow from the facts at all.

And I naively thought meta-narratives in history were supposed to be over decades ago.

>But it is seldom helpful as a tool for prediction and problem-solving.

I'm not that sure. Perhaps that is the prejudice of an age with lesser historical ambitions.

Can you please elaborate? what grand stories (or meta-narratives) historically shown to be good tools for prediction and problem-solving do you have in mind?

The grand story of "stages of historical development of the means of production" in Marxism for example. Or the grand story of the rise and decline of civilizations in Spengler.

I have to think about these. Have immediate negative gut reaction, but want to think about if for some time.

Anyway, thank you very much for answering!

Agreed. Surely the authors don't mean that stories qua stories make you stupid. The love of your own stories combined with confirmation bias, perhaps.

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